“Red Rocks Concert”/Emily Dwan
“When this is all over,” I’ve thought several times over the past seven months, “I’m buying concert tickets.” Phoebe Bridgers, Fiona Apple, and Taylor Swift released albums in quarantine, ergo, they will tour when it’s over. I have listened to all three albums—Punisher, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, and folklore—over and over again since they came out. I have made playlists for the extremely specific moods I am trying to evoke and then listened to those until they no longer tug at the numbness. Once, I listened to just “Bye Bye Bye” for almost an hour. I enjoy experiencing music in solitude, on walks, in bed at 4 in the morning the night before I got my wisdom teeth out (which is when folklore dropped, because Taylor Swift just knows what you’ll need before you do). It’s not that solitary listening isn’t good—it’s great—it’s that it’s not the same as live. I can walk around the neighborhood as much as I want, I can twirl in the forest preserve if no one else is there, but I can’t dance like I would in a crowded venue, standing on my toes to see the stage. For once, I have too much personal space, and it’s suffocating.
I miss concerts. I know you know the feeling. How, no matter how far away you are, you can feel the bass in your chest. How when you emerge into the night, sweaty, tired, and usually splattered with some unknown substance, you feel like each one of your cells has turned over in one go, like you’ve been made new and electric by something greater than biology. How you can’t stop smiling. How your feet feel swollen and a little prickly and you can’t wait to take your shoes off. How you know that, tomorrow, no one you encounter will know the particulars of the experience you just had, but that for a moment, everyone in the immediate vicinity understands.
I do not generally believe in God—at least not one that intervenes in human affairs—but I do believe in the divine, and I know that I believe because I have felt it at concerts. I feel it when I sing along, when I catch the eye of someone doing the same with an expression that can only be described as rapture. I feel it when I dance, swaying my shoulders and bopping my head like a teenage boy at homecoming. I feel it when I finally stand still, close my eyes, and breathe. I feel it, most of all, in the silence that hangs, web-like and heavy, over a theater of people awaiting the next song.
My friends tell me my taste in music is depressing. At my 22nd birthday party, I was scolded for adding too much “sad girl indie-folk” to the playlist. “It’s my birthday!” I protested. “This is what I like.” Seeing sad music live—that’s when I know that other people like it too. That’s when I know I belong. Hanif Abdurraqib, who is, I think, the best person writing about music today, describes concerts as “the spaces where I understood that my fears were not entirely unique. The ways that I felt about navigating the world were shared by others, the few of us drawn together by both our need to escape into music, and the things that drove us to the escape.”
I have written about my propensity toward escapism before, but I think I go to concerts to feel real. I go to remember that, as many times as I have been winded by a lyric that cuts just a little too close to home, so too, has someone else. “What I mean is, we came here to see blood,” Abdurraqib writes in his poem “At My First Punk Rock Show Ever, 1998.” Whether physical or metaphorical, I go to concerts to feel a collective pulse.
One of my favorite college memories happened during a rainstorm my sophomore year. My friend Alex had to record a group of us singing a niggun—a Jewish wordless melody—for a class project. Maybe ten of us gathered in the Hillel student lounge, the more unlucky of us damp and shivering. Using her hands as cues, Alex taught us this one. For fifteen minutes, we sang. For fifteen minutes, we created—each of us—something greater than ourselves. For fifteen minutes, we sang, swaying and tapping our feet, and then it was over. Captured on camera, maybe, but at its core ephemeral. The energy we created dissipated as we packed up our bags and returned to our lives, but it made enough of an impression on me that I’m trying to pin it down in writing two and a half years later. I know I can’t. That’s not a bad thing; it just is. Live music is special, in a way that I can try my best to describe, but that I ultimately won’t be able to fully encapsulate. If you know, you know. I can’t wait to experience it again.
In honor of concerts, here are a few of my favorite live performances available online. Some are full sets, some just a few songs; my only criterion was that they had to be filmed in front of a live audience.
Nirvana, MTV Unplugged, 1993
A classic. Needs no introduction other than to note that the candles onstage look AWESOME.
Julien Baker, Brooklyn Steel, 2018
Anyone who’s heard me talk about music in the past few years has heard me talk about Julien Baker. I dare you to watch the full set and not emerge a changed person.
Hozier, NYC Subway Pop-Up, 2019
The acoustics of a subway station might be some of the best ever, and you can fight me on that. The cars whoosh and rattle in the background in this one, and oh wow, I miss public transportation a lot.
Bon Iver, “Heavenly Father,” Sydney Opera House, 2016
Prepare to transcend the earthly plane.
Sufjan Stevens, North Charleston Performing Arts Center, 2015
Come for some of the most emotionally devastating lyrics you’ll ever hear, stay for the surprise cover of “Hotline Bling.”
Tracy Chapman, Oakland Coliseum Arena, 1988
I saw a Tweet once that asked “What is the best song and why is it Fast Car?” And, well, yeah.
Thanks for sticking around with the earnestness. We love earnestness here. Hopefully, this gives you some listening material until next time.